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"Down Among the Sticks and Bones" by Seanan McGuire
This is the second book in the Wayward Children series (first book: Every Heart A Doorway). This book focuses on Jack and Jill from Every Heart, and what happened to them before they came to Ms. West's school.
Twin sisters Jack and Jill were seventeen when they found their way home and were packed off to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children.
This is the story of what happened first…
Spoilers below!
Unfortunately I have to admit I did not like this one as much as the first book. It drops the alluring conceit of isekai children returned to the real world, which I had really enjoyed. The book is quite short, even shorter than "Every Heart a Doorway," and told in a sort of fairytale style, which means that much of the story is summarized (quite poetically!) rather than played out beat-by-beat. On the whole it feels less like a stand-alone novel and more like Jack and Jill's backstory episode, and they didn't intrigue me enough in "Every Heart" for this to be a deeply compelling premise.
The high-level style means we don't actually learn a lot about what happened to them. The Moors are not developed that much—there's minimal worldbuilding—and we still know almost nothing about the Master and Dr. Bleak, nor about how Jill became so drawn in by the Master she was willing to kill for him. The latter was a significant weak point to me—it's naturally understandable how Jack became close to Dr. Bleak: he was her mentor, he cared for her, he was doing what she believed was good work, but it's far less understandable how Jill ended up in the mindset she has in "Every Heart" and it would have benefited from more explanation.
Shout-out to sapphic Jack though, love that for her. I did find myself a bit bewildered by her rhapsodizing about how Alexis taught her how to love given how little time Alexis actually had in the novel, but again I think that's a consequence of how short the book is.
McGuire's prose still hits, and the picture she paints of the Wolcotts' lives prior to Jack and Jill's disappearance is so realistically grim. Chester and Sorina are such deeply selfish, careless people, but in a way that can come off harmless on the surface. The moment when Chester is so disgusted by the sight of his wife giving birth that he vows never to touch her again was so real in the sort of understated yet violent depersonalization of someone who is supposed to be his life partner.
The way Jack and Jill grow further apart with age, consumed with jealousy as each child wants what the other one has is also painfully real in the sort of house they were raised in. The book describes how they were robbed of the joys of twinhood by their parents and it's so tragic because you can see how unnatural it is. They started out close, they want to love each other—even at her worst, Jill still wants to be close to Jack—and yet they were put into circumstances that denied it.
This backstory does have the impact of making Jack look willfully ignorant in "Every Heart"--if she knew that Jill had already killed for the Master, her suspicion should have been up immediately when kids started dying at school.
The premise of the next book--"Beneath the Sugar Sky"--sounds more promising, so I will be pressing on with that one.
Twin sisters Jack and Jill were seventeen when they found their way home and were packed off to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children.
This is the story of what happened first…
Spoilers below!
Unfortunately I have to admit I did not like this one as much as the first book. It drops the alluring conceit of isekai children returned to the real world, which I had really enjoyed. The book is quite short, even shorter than "Every Heart a Doorway," and told in a sort of fairytale style, which means that much of the story is summarized (quite poetically!) rather than played out beat-by-beat. On the whole it feels less like a stand-alone novel and more like Jack and Jill's backstory episode, and they didn't intrigue me enough in "Every Heart" for this to be a deeply compelling premise.
The high-level style means we don't actually learn a lot about what happened to them. The Moors are not developed that much—there's minimal worldbuilding—and we still know almost nothing about the Master and Dr. Bleak, nor about how Jill became so drawn in by the Master she was willing to kill for him. The latter was a significant weak point to me—it's naturally understandable how Jack became close to Dr. Bleak: he was her mentor, he cared for her, he was doing what she believed was good work, but it's far less understandable how Jill ended up in the mindset she has in "Every Heart" and it would have benefited from more explanation.
Shout-out to sapphic Jack though, love that for her. I did find myself a bit bewildered by her rhapsodizing about how Alexis taught her how to love given how little time Alexis actually had in the novel, but again I think that's a consequence of how short the book is.
McGuire's prose still hits, and the picture she paints of the Wolcotts' lives prior to Jack and Jill's disappearance is so realistically grim. Chester and Sorina are such deeply selfish, careless people, but in a way that can come off harmless on the surface. The moment when Chester is so disgusted by the sight of his wife giving birth that he vows never to touch her again was so real in the sort of understated yet violent depersonalization of someone who is supposed to be his life partner.
The way Jack and Jill grow further apart with age, consumed with jealousy as each child wants what the other one has is also painfully real in the sort of house they were raised in. The book describes how they were robbed of the joys of twinhood by their parents and it's so tragic because you can see how unnatural it is. They started out close, they want to love each other—even at her worst, Jill still wants to be close to Jack—and yet they were put into circumstances that denied it.
This backstory does have the impact of making Jack look willfully ignorant in "Every Heart"--if she knew that Jill had already killed for the Master, her suspicion should have been up immediately when kids started dying at school.
The premise of the next book--"Beneath the Sugar Sky"--sounds more promising, so I will be pressing on with that one.